Authorities in northwest China’s Xinjiang region have detained 19-year-old Uyghur Erfan Hezim—a former member of China’s national youth football team—in a “political re-education camp” for “visiting foreign countries” after he traveled abroad to train and take part in matches, according to local sources. Hezim, also known by his Chinese name Ye Erfan, is a top soccer forward in the Chinese Super League who ...

International Policy Digest China is moving on multiple fronts to pre-empt in the short-term Uyghur foreign fighters fleeing Syria and Iraq from reasserting themselves in Central Asia and longer term prevent the emergence of an ever more vocal Diaspora like what Tibetans have achieved. The multi-pronged Chinese approach involves weaving Afghanistan more firmly into the fabric of China’s Belt and Road initia ...

Foreign Policy In its attempts to control Uighurs abroad, the Chinese government is holding families hostage. Mahmut, a Uighur living in a Scandinavian country, describes 2017 as the “saddest” year for his family. Born to secular Muslim parents, Mahmut, who asked to be identified by a pseudonym, says his family’s troubles began in late 2016 when the Chinese government pressured a cousin and his wife to retu ...

The Economist WHEN the authorities manage to lure or drag home a fugitive accused of corruption, they crow. But they are quieter about their equally successful campaign to repatriate Uighurs, a mostly Muslim ethnic group from Xinjiang, in China’s far west. Many Uighurs chafe at the growing presence of Han Chinese in their region, and at increasing restrictions on their personal and religious freedom. Some t ...

Amnesty International Gulchehra Hoja still remembers the first time her daughter, then three years old, met her grandparents. “That was their happiest time,” Gulchehra said of her parents. “They treated her like a princess.” That was 10 years ago. It was her daughter’s first time to visit the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region (XUAR) of China, where Gulchehra grew up. Her husband had travelled with their eld ...